Tag: back pats

By now, you should have finally made it through our gargantuan 2012 Potato Awards feature, which recapped the biggest and baddest MMA news stories of last year, as viewed through the twisted mirrors of the CagePotato Funhouse. This week we decided to throw together another year-in-review feature, in which the members of the CP staff selected their favorite articles that they wrote for the site in 2012. Check out our picks below, click the headlines to revisit our work, and if we left out any of your own personal faves, holler at us in the comments section.

BG says: In five years of running CagePotato, this is probably the article I’m most proud of. Part of that is simply because of the massive effort it required — by the time the “50 Worst” reached its final form, I had been writing and researching it, off and on, for about six months. I liked the idea of doing a shadow-history of the UFC, giving readers a guided tour of how the Octagon’s forgotten losers and punching-bags did so much to build the sport’s mythology in their own right, by acting as fodder for the legends. I believe it’s the most definitive record of UFC failure, in all its various forms, ever committed to the Internet.

BG says: Well, you can’t argue with success. Since its publication in August, this article has generated over 2 million pageviews, making it by far the most popular CagePotato article of all time, in terms of raw numbers. And let’s be honest: Spending an afternoon searching for nude photos of Jade Bryce isn’t exactly a tough day at the office.

BG says: I took a lot of heat for this piece, for everything from the title (“disrespectful!”) to the concept itself (“why pay tribute to this asshole?!”), but I found it really interesting to sort through all the available information on Levens, then shape it into a single narrative, spanning his rough childhood, to his early successes, to the setbacks that ultimately derailed his life. It’s a terrible story, but an undeniably compelling one.